My Word

As a “second shift” parent – an older adult who is now parenting a second family – I am rediscovering the joys of parenthood, as well as the occasional frustrations.

Young children take a lot of time, patience, attention and energy. When you are dealing with two children under the age of three, these resources can seem to be in short supply. This supply and demand problem is further complicated because the kids are seldom on the same page. Most of the time their needs are in direct opposition.

Every time Howard Pearce and I had an opportunity for a serious discussion, which was rare, I would often say something like “that isn’t fair.” He would say, “Life was not meant to be fair.”

He never got around to explaining why. That’s rather like saying to a child who asks one those inscrutable questions, “It just isn’t” or “Because I said so,” then end the discussion by hiding behind a newspaper.

Recently the head of a United Nations panel warned, "If the world doesn't cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, global warming could become out of control." A group of Nobel laureate scientists predicts dangers are going to become worse as time passes.

Cris Field of the Carnegie Institute for Science in California reports, "We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential." Other climate scientists say, "Nobody around the world is immune."

They were talking about physics, saying that no object or no place can be truly empty. They argued that every place and everything is filled with something. The same rule applies to geopolitics and global leadership.

Here’s a brief history of the American auto business since World War II.

Some of us remember when “made in Japan” was a synonym for “junk.”

Early in WWII the Japanese captured an intact American fighter plane. Their studies showed the plane – probably a P-40 like General Chenault and his American Volunteer “Flying Tigers” used in China before Pearl Harbor – was so far superior to anything they had.

During the hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia Penn., the delegates to the Constitutional Convention came to a rut in the road. The group, whose goal fell nothing short of drawing up the legal framework for a whole new nation, had fractured into exhausting squabbles.

One delegate, Ben Franklin, decided to try to focus everyone’s attention on that goal and gave a speech proposing that if they could not come to an accord on their own, they might need some divine assistance in the form of a prayer led by outside clergy.

Recently someone left a clipped out episode of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon in our mailbox.

I don’t know why.

I admit to looking at a few cartoons like Blondie, Dennis, Beatle Bailey hoping to find something amusing, and sometimes I do. I even occasionally look at Doonesbury to see if I can understand it. Never do. This episode is primarily a phone conversation between someone from the GOP and what I presume to be a PR firm.

The GOP guy says: “We need to prove that raising the minimum wage would hurt the economy.”

As pointed out before, our family does not meet the standards in terms of income or accumulated wealth to be considered wealthy. If we did we’d probably move our legal residence to Florida, Tennessee or some of the other state who have no state income tax or death taxes (the most obscene tax of all).

Let’s look at these four issues and how they affect our lives. Let’s begin by describing loss, which may be of two kinds: the loss of materials things such as money or a business from a bad decision. We may also lose by theft and be aggravated because of our carelessness or bad judgment.

The other type of loss is of a love one or a close friend, or the loss of health or our physical well being.